Every week we post six lines from a work of ours, a work-in-progress or published or a recommendation of someone else’s work with at least one LGBT character. Posted at Rainbow Snippets here: [LINK] https://www.facebook.com/groups/963484217054974

In this snippet from my story “At Least the Natives are Friendly,” https://authorjeffbaker.com/2022/12/09/at-least-the-natives-are-friendly-cool-down-with-friday-flash-fics-for-december-9th-2022-from-jeff-baker/ we meet Zack who is working as a warehouse manager on an icy alien world but finds some warmth for himself. We open with Zack doing something we are all familiar with; scraping his car window on an icy morning.

Zack had shipped out on a star freighter when he was sixteen and had worked his way across the solar systems as far away as he could get from his abusive family. He hadn’t minded being on his own and when the opportunity to run the warehouse on Blumenstuck had come up he’d jumped on it. When he’d been told it was winter most of the year there, he’d shrugged.

What the hey! Just like Wisconsin. Scraping the car window every morning was a pain, but the job wasn’t bad and it paid well and the Earth people shared the world with the Olarni, the furry humanoids liked the cold and had arrived on the planet two hundred years earlier, seeking a colder world.

I’ll break a few rules with this snippet and get to the nice, warm ending:

Zack grinned. That was the real fringe benefit, one that made him stick with the job and the cold mornings.

He came home every evening to a sweet, warm, furry pan-sexual Olarni man who would make any world Zack was on feel like home.

Emidos had been raised on Blumenstuck and he loved it as he loved Zack.

And they both laughed at the name the icy world had been given by the Earth colonists who had seen it hanging in space like a flower. “ Blumenstuck” meant “flower piece.”

“Really cold for a flower,” they would laugh.

An addenda here: I largely improvised this story in one sitting and the line about Zack fleeing his abusive family just popped up. Not like my life at all (thank God!) but I’ve known people to whom it was a reality. It makes the warm ending of the story all the sweeter! See you in a week! —–jeff